Frank S Meyer The Fusionist as Libertarian Manque英文文献.pdfVIP

Frank S. Meyer: The Fusionist as Libertarian Manqué by Murray Rothbard Online edition published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. © Copyright 2004. Originally published in Modern Age , Fall 1981, pp. 352-363. Frank S. Meyer: The Fusionist as Libertarian Murray N. Rothbard UNTIL A FEW YEARS AGO, THE conservative spectrum could be com- fortably sundered into the traditionalists at one pole, the liber- tarians at the other, and the fusionists as either judicious synthesizers or muddled moderates (depending on ones point of view) in between. The traditionalists were, I contend, in favor of state-coerced morality; the libertarians were allegedly in favor of liberty but soft on virtue; the fusionists—at least from their own perspective—combined the best of both poles by favoring tradition and morality on the one hand, but freedom of choice and individual rights on the other. Now, however, it is impossible to sustain these neat classifications. In the first place, the varieties of conservative thought and policy have greatly expanded and diversified in recent years, so that the familiar triad can scarcely suffice any longer. It is difficult to figure out, for example, what the ideologies of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the late Frank S. Meyer, M.E. Bradford, Harry Jaffa, Donald Atwell Zoll, Russell Kirk, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Jude Wanniski have in common; the venerable triad is scarcely enough to encompass them all. Secondly, the libertarians have broken off to form their own movement, and the characterization of them as devoid of concern for morality is distorted and oversimplified, to say the least. Furthermore, the fusionists used to maintain that, while their success was far from assured among conservative intellectuals, at least the conservative masses were fusionists to the core. But the burgeo